Statism, Pluralism, and Global Justice

Colin Koopman University of California, Santa Cruz [email protected]

Political philosophers and political theorists in recent decades have increasingly turned their attention to what is now commonly referred to as the problem of global distributive justice. This problem concerns not only the applicability of current conceptions of justice to our political relations on the global level, but also the adequacy of political conceptions originally designed for the sake of national political institutions to newer global political institutions. The problem of global justice, in short, is a problem about justice in a world in which human affairs are increasingly conducted on a global scale. While massive institutions of global trade have been with us for at least the past few centuries (and so it may seem like political philosophers are merely belated tourists to the scene) we are in recent decades beginning to witness the globalization of even the most mundane of everyday activities (and so it may be that political philosophers can excuse themselves from having visited these shores only quite recently). Globalization, it might be said without much irony, is today increasingly everywhere. The problem of global justice that is of greatest concern for political philosophers is the problem of distributive justice as raised in these conditions of increasingly ubiquitous globalization. In recent decades this problem tended to be treated in either of two ways according to two seemingly different conceptions of justice. These two competing theories of

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global distributive justice are commonly referred to under the headings of cosmopolitanism and westphalianism.

In short, cosmopolitans seek to extend traditional liberal ideals of

equality and liberty to the global context whilst westphalians argue that these grand ideals cannot be legitimately extended in this way. Motivated in part by the sense that proponents of these two theories are increasingly at an impasse with one another, some of the most recent contributions to the global distributive justice literature have begun to sketch an alternative third theoretical position which is in some respects intermediate between the globalism of the cosmopolitans and the nationalism of the westphalians. This new family of theories of global justice holds that the right way of negotiating the globalization of our political affairs is to steer a course intermediate somewhere between full-blown globalism and thinned-out nationalism. These new intermediate theories lack, however, at least two prerequisites necessary for a coherent theoretical contribution to the global justice debates. The first prerequisite is a convincing account of the mutual failings of the cosmopolitan and westphalian theories against which they might be positioned. The thought here is that intermediate accounts would be amply fueled by arguments against assumptions common to both the cosmopolitans and the westphalians. The second prerequisite is a greater self-consciousness which might serve to weave into a more coherent whole some of the loose threads of connection currently running between various intermediate theories. This article takes some firs steps toward filling in both prerequisites. In the first half I recount the well-known cosmopolitan and westphalian contributions to the literature with an eye toward exposing some of the unacknowledged but deep affinities informing both theories.

At the heart of each is a

philosophical assumption of statism according to which the primary subjects to which and through which justice applies to human affairs are unifying state-like structures. In the article’s second half I turn to the emerging family of intermediate views in order to more fully

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develop this philosophical perspective which promises to successfully break from the debilitating statism shared by cosmopolitans and westphalians—here the focus is on Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel’s recent contributions.

At the heart of this perspective is a

philosophical commitment to pluralism as oriented by a metaphilosophical endorsement of pragmatism—here the focus is on the work of contemporary pragmatists such as James Bohman as oriented by the classical pragmatisms of John Dewey and William James.

Shared Statism in Cosmopolitanism and Westphalianism Despite all the superficial differences that clearly separate cosmopolitans and westphalians, these two families of views actually share a great deal in common concerning the way in which they conceive of the basic problem of global justice and thus also concerning what they are willing to regard as a potential candidate solution to this problem. Common to both the cosmopolitan and westphalian perspectives is an unacknowledged shared presumption of statism. This shared statism is a tremendous obstacle to correctly formulating the central problems of global justice and thus to correctly devising solutions to this growing family of problems. Before explaining how this statism is attached by both positions I will begin with a cursory review of both families of views followed by an explication of statism. The core of the cosmopolitan position is that the demands of distributive justice derive from basic obligations we all have to one another as human beings. These obligations are not grounded in any special feature of what we have chosen to do with ourselves or what sorts of associations we are a part of. The demands of distributive justice are basic humanitarian demands and are owed to each and every one of us in virtue of our common humanity. A core feature of the cosmopolitan position is that recent decades have been witness to massive overhauls in the global economic and political structure such that today we are near possession of the institutions requisite for fulfilling the basic demands of distributive justice.

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While these duties perhaps applied to those in former centuries, they were certainly not enforceable. The recent emergence of a global economic and political structure not only enables us to discharge our distributive duties, but it also raises the stakes of these duties insofar as we find ourselves increasingly implicated in global networks of trade and finance in virtue of which we wealthy inhabitants of developed countries are densely connected to the poor villagers on the other side of the planet who dye our fabrics, tan our leathers, pick our coffee beans, and answer our phone calls to our banking institutions and home appliance manufacturers. Cosmopolitans, while not all of one mind on these matters, thus tend to emphasize two points: basic distributive duties are grounded in respect for the equal moral status of all persons and are further derived from egalitarian principles which govern the special relations which the global rich increasingly take up with the global poor. 1 In contrast to cosmopolitans, the political philosophers I am calling westphalians tend to see distributive duties as a special class of duties typically referred to as associative duties. Associative duties are those obligations which we possess in virtue of our associations to one another. For most westphalians, the modern nation-state and its attendant social system is the primary association in the modern world. Our distributive duties hence crystallize within the associative institution of the nation-state. Westphalians thusly specify both the grounds of justice (the mutual imposition of shared norms, generally embodied in legal and political institutions) and the scope of justice (which applies only where such legal and political institutions are in force, generally at the level of nation-states). 2 My argument is that both cosmopolitanism and westphalianism in their most common strains presume statism. Statism is of course not an entirely perspicuous notion as it takes on

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For Rawlsian strains of cosmopolitanism see Beitz (1979) and Pogge (2002); for Habermasian strains see Held (1995), Habermas (2004), and Benhabib (2004); and for an Aristotelian inflection of the Kantian view see Nussbaum (2006). 2 The most prominent westphalian view is probably that of Rawls (1999) but see also the compelling offering by Nagel (2005); other contributions in a Rawlsian vein include Blake (2002) and Risse (2005); see finally De Soto (2000) for a more classical liberal argument for westphalianism.

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different connotations in different contexts. This concept thus stands in need of a little explication-cum-stipulation before deployment.

One way of understanding the statism

common to cosmopolitanism and westphalianism is to refocus their shared comprehension of the problem of global justice in a way that explicitly highlights the role played by statism therein.

The problem of global justice, as it is understood by most cosmopolitans and

westphalians, can be roughly characterized in terms of two theses. The Global Demand Thesis holds that there is a demand for global justice today insofar as global institutions and transactions are increasingly constitutive of the life prospects of many persons throughout the world. The Global State Thesis holds that there exist today or should exist in the near future the proper practical mechanisms for addressing and fulfilling the demand for justice expressed by Global Demand in the form of some set of state-legal institutions which can be roughly characterized as shaping what Rawls called “the basic structure of society.” 3 The crucial idea here consists in recognizing just how important Rawls’s idea of the basic structure of society has been for recent work on global justice. The basic structure, in short, is the combined set of institutions and practices which constitute the core constraints that profoundly shape the life prospects of anyone living in a given society, or as Rawls puts it “the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation.” 4

These institutions and

practices typically include constitutional structures such as legislative process, political structures such as policing, exchange structures such as regulated markets, familial structures such as parental authority, and a welter of cultural structures concerning religion, education, and art. Rawls’s profoundly influential idea was simply that there is such a thing as a singular basic structure and that it can be effectively regulated by governance taking the form of laws

3 4

Cf. Rawls 1971, 7ff.. Rawls 1971, 7

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backed by certain legitimately coercive state institutions. The guiding if implicit assumption in this idea is that states can regulate basic structures through the media of law, policy, and regulation. This idea seems intuitive to many political philosophers today.

But it is worth

remembering that prior to Rawls justice was often thought of not as applying to the core ground rules specifying how a social structure is set up but rather as applying directly to relations between persons and institutions.

Rawls’s idea of a basic structure helped us

understand how there might be deep structural issues that are a subject of justice beyond those surface effects of coercion in interpersonal morality. In the context of global justice debate, the impact of Rawls’s intervention is measured by the distance separating early contributions such as Peter Singer’s 1972 “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (focused as it was on global poverty as a moral problem each of us must address in our personal lives) from the spate of recent contributions to the very journal where Singer’s article was first published in the first number of its first volume (the focus now is on global inequality as a structural problem far exceeding personal morality). 5 It was above all Rawls’s idea of the basic structure that helped, as the familiar wisdom about Rawls’s place in twentieth-century philosophy has it, revive the very project of political philosophy as traditionally conceived—if there is such a thing as a basic structure which can be effectively (and morally) regulated, then political philosophers have the important assignment of helping to specify what this basic structure in fact is, what sorts of moral and political norms properly apply to it, and which laws and policies might best instantiate those norms. 6 The Rawlsian idea of the basic structure helps specify at least two relations crucial to the question of global justice. It provides conceptual resources for assessing both the proper

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Cf. Singer (1972), published in Philosophy & Public Affairs. Cf. Nagel (2003), Scheffler (2006), and Young (2006) on the importance of Rawls’s idea of the basic structure; cf. Abizadeh (2007) on the importance of this idea for the global justice debates.

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site of justice (for what political affairs and institutions is justice appropriate?) and the proper means for insuring that justice exists at whatever level we specify it (how can we regulate these affairs and institutions to insure rough equality of distribution?). Recall that I have characterized the debates over global justice in terms of two theses. The Global Demand Thesis posits a demand for justice for a global site as a consequence of the increasing importance of global transactions in shaping the lives and aspirations of persons worldwide. The Global State Thesis asserts that state institutions regulating the shape of the basic structure of society are the sole means capable of addressing any legitimate demands for global justice. 7 These two theses as articulated through the conceptual device of the basic structure bring into focus the shared statism underlying cosmopolitanism and westphalianism. This shared statism thus has quite a great deal to do with the influential position occupied by Rawls’s framing device of the basic structure in contemporary debates over distributive justice (as well as in contemporary political philosophy more generally). The cosmopolitan endorses both the global demand thesis and the global state thesis. Cosmopolitans think that there are today obligations of justice on a global scale which we owe to one another and that some set of state-based institutions, in other words an institutional framework for securing justice for the global basic structure of society, is the only practicable way of insuring that these obligations are met. Cosmopolitans think that something like a global basic structure of society has already come into existence or will soon do so and that the task which befalls us now is that of institutionally correcting this basic structure so that it may embody right and justice. Westphalians, by contrast, deny both the global demand thesis and the global state thesis. They do not of course simply reject the global demand thesis out of hand. The most sophisticated westphalian positions accept the basic intelligibility of the

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There are of course more general forms of these two theses which might simply be called the Demand Thesis and the State Thesis. In their more general forms the demand thesis and the state thesis together characterize a coherent political philosophy which could work at many different levels and not just at the global level.

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global demand thesis. They agree that there is much reason to believe that we are today in a position to make the demands of justice on one another globally.

But in the end, the

westphalian concludes, these demands for global justice are in fact not triggered by anything capable of triggering an obligation to justice. The westphalian reaches this conclusion on the basis of their denial of the global state thesis. Westphalians hold that there is no such thing as a global basic structure of society. Denying the global state thesis, westphalians then infer the denial of the global demand thesis. This is because westphalians tend to view demands for justice as triggered by the existence of the proper institutional frameworks in which such justice might be met. Without the existence of such a framework, for example a global state, there simply is no legitimate demand for such justice, for example a global justice. So while the westphalian view is that the global demand for justice gets triggered by the existence of a global basic structure of society, the cosmopolitan view is precisely the reverse. They regard the global demand for justice as taking priority such that the need for a global basic structure of society gets triggered by the moral demand for global justice. These appear to be two very different ways of assessing the problem of global justice. But notice now shared assumptions common between these two otherwise radically disparate positions.

These shared assumptions can be specified in terms of a third thesis which

specifies the relation between the global demand thesis and the global state thesis: the Statist Thesis asserts that the only way of meeting the demands specified by the Global Demand thesis is by way of the state institutions discriminated by the Global State thesis. To put it more explicitly, the Statist Thesis asserts that the only way of meeting demands for justice in global sites is through the means of some set of state institutions in which we can locate something like the basic structure of society. Statism is the thesis that the only way of effectively meeting legitimate demands for justice is through institutions which are statebased and law-oriented.

Cosmopolitans and westphalians alike are beholden to statism

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insofar as: a) they articulate questions about the proper sites and the proper means of justice in terms of the conceptual resources afforded by the idea of the basic structure, and b) these conceptual resources lend themselves best to statism. As to (a): both families of theorists hold that the questions about the site and means of justice are best assessed in terms of the site (where is it located?) and means (how can it be regulated and used to regulate?) of the basic structure. As to (b): the basic structure serves as a unifying concept which brings into focus the unifying structures according to which an otherwise disparate group of persons, actions, and practices all comprise a singular political system; and our best (and indeed I would claim our only) approximation and realization of such a unifying and systematizing political structure is that of modern states for we no longer have much of an idea of what systematic social unity looks like in the absence of the state structure. 8 I have not shown that this shared statism deriving from the framing of the idea of the basic structure is debilitating. I will nevertheless turn at this point to sketching an alternative political philosophical framework for considering questions about global justice. At the heart of this alternative is the thought that we can, by departing from the statism informing cosmopolitanism and westphalianism, both affirm the global demand thesis and deny the global state thesis. We can agree with cosmopolitans that there are legitimate demands for justice at the global level and agree with the westphalians that we have no existing institutions capable of effectively meeting these demands.

Rather than leaving us saddled with an

insoluble problem, namely a demand for justice which simply cannot be met, such a position is made eminently intelligible by dropping statism in favor of pluralism. Pluralism breaks from the monism characteristic of statism expressed in the familiar idea that there is such a

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I am urging, in other words, that we should leave behind the familiar Rawlsian framing device of the basic structure of society. In doing this we need not deny that political philosophy over the past three decades has realized many benefits by framing its work in terms of this conception. But the potential danger of conceptions whose influence runs this far and wide is that they may cause certain blindnesses: in this case, the westphalian blindness to certain legitimate demands for justice or the cosmopolitan blindness to certain institutional constraints shaping our ability to appropriately respond to demands for justice.

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thing as the (singular) basic structure of society which might be deployed to assess the site and the means of justice. Pluralism enables us to recognize that justice applies to a plurality of sites and, accordingly, can be achieved only by a plurality of means. This is now a muchneeded shift in orientation.

Emerging Intermediate Alternatives The experiment in pluralism I am proposing is of course already underway. Important recent work by a number of political philosophers has cleared an initial path beyond the false alternative between the monism of the cosmopolitans and westphalians. Much of this work is put forth in the spirit of an ‘intermediate’ position somewhere between cosmopolitanism and westphalianism. The thinking typically behind this view is that our political affairs today are somewhere between the nation-state paradigm of the Cold War and the global village paradigm perceived in some far off Utopia or Dystopia. Until we fully emerge out of the old paradigm and fully evolve into the new paradigm we inhabit a transitional space evincing enormous complexity. Rather than waiting around for the nation-state to return or the globalstate to emerge we political philosophers should set our sights on theorizing the intermediate transitional space of current political reality. This sounds eminently sensible. What I would like to show is that work on this third intermediate conception of justice could benefit enormously from dropping the statist trappings of the framework supplied by the basic structure of society and taking up a non-statist conception of global political pluralism. Among the most impressive articulations of the sort of intermediate view which I favor is work by Iris Marion Young on inclusive global democracy, by Archon Fung on democratic minipublics, and by Carold Gould on transnational human rights. 9 To this list I

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Cf. Young (2000), Fung (2003), Gould (2004); other recent work which seems to qualify as intermediate in my sense includes Ypi (2008) despite a misleading title and Weinstock (2006).

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would also add work on globalizing development by Amartya Sen, on globalizing redistribution and recognition by Nancy Fraser, and on globalizing identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah, though I recognize that in each of these three cases a fuller argument would be needed in order to situate their work as intermediate in my sense. 10 The work that is most clearly intermediate in my preferred sense is that which explicitly takes its bearings from philosophical pragmatism, the perspective I adopt in elaborating the intermediate view in the next section, including for example recent work by James Bohman on polycentric transnational democracy. 11 Since my primary concern here is not with global democracy and global human rights per se but rather the related but separate issue of global distributive justice, I would like to briefly consider the intermediate perspective as it has recently appeared within this latter literature. Recent work here that can be appropriately be considered intermediate in its articulation of a view that rejects cosmopolitanism and westphalianism as extremes which we should aim to middle between includes contributions by Norman Daniels, A.J. Julius and others. 12 But it is Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel who have articulated the most convincing account of a third intermediate position somewhere between cosmopolitanism and westphalianism: “[D]iscussion of global justice should move past the intellectually and politically limiting debate between cosmopolitanism and its nationalist or statist antithesis. Instead we argue that a political morality can be political in a capacious sense, that is, sensitive to the circumstances and associative conditions, to the ‘different cases or types of relation’ for which it is formulated, without being statist.” 13 Cohen and Sabel cash out their conception of different types of relation in terms of what they call “pluralism” in one place

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Cf. Sen (1999), Fraser (2005), and Appiah (2006) Cf. Bohman (2007), Aboulafia (2001), Hickman (2004), Fischer (2008), and Hamington (2008) 12 Cf. Daniels (2007, 333ff.) and Julius (2006) 13 Cohen and Sabel 2006, 149; cf. Cohen and Sabel (2005) 11

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and “polyarchy” elsewhere. 14 Their pluralism explicitly affirms the need to move beyond statism in holding that “there are distinct normative principles appropriate to different types of relations depending on some normatively salient features of those relations” such that states are by no means the only context available for triggering every type of normative principle. As such it is not clear that Cohen and Sabel require their further elected move of defending procedural norms within the state as necessary for triggering distributive norms outside of the state, and particularly so if we take seriously the pluralist idea that these two types of norms might be triggered by different types of normative relations. Their claim is that “what is true of governance norms is surely true as well of norms focused on outcomes” but their argument for this equivalence is unclear. While what they call “weak statism” may be needed to trigger procedural norms it is not clear that it is needed to trigger distributive norms. 15 Indeed the very pluralism which Cohen and Sabel seem to want to endorse would suggest that these two different types of norms need not hang together in the way that they otherwise claim. The problem, in the end, may consist in Cohen and Sabel’s tendency to take up pluralism in the rather limited form of a Rawlsian “reasonable pluralism” that reinscribes pluralism within the statist framework of the idea of a basic structure. 16 An alternative non-statist framework would enable a fuller endorsement of pluralism as the context which should orient our theory and practice of global justice. This in turn would enable the development of a more viable intermediate position about global justice. Samuel Scheffler has noted that intermediate positions concerning global political processes (presumably both pragmatist and non-pragmatist views) can be made viable “only if it proves possible to devise human institutions, practices, and ways of life that take seriously the equal worth of persons [as cosmopolitans do] without undermining people’s capacity to

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Cohen and Sabel 2006, 159ff. and 2005, 779ff. Cohen and Sabel 2006, 179, 150 16 Cf. Cohen (1993) for an explication and defense of Rawlsian reasonable pluralism. 15

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sustain their special loyalties and attachments [as westphalians emphasize].” I agree with Scheffler when he claims that “it is not just a matter of producing cogent arguments in support of some abstract formulation of the [intermediate] view” because the sorts of institution which we need must actually be developed, tested, and experimented with in political practice. 17 In order to take Scheffler’s recommendations seriously, we political philosophers ought to take up two complementary projects. One project will involve inquiring, in collaboration with social scientists such as anthropologists and historians, into actual practices for clues about how people actually are mixing together cosmopolitan demands for equal respect and westphalian demands for special responsibilities. Another project, this one requiring more initiative on the part of political philosophers, would involve explicating and refining general political philosophical frameworks that make the most sense of such practices. In this way, we can tie together certain democratic political practices and the political philosophies which make sense of them, rather than merely looking toward political philosophies which seek to argumentatively justify some nonexistent practical program. I take both of these projects, the social scientific and the political philosophical one, as crucially important for realizing the type of third intermediate position which Scheffler and others find promising. One way of motivating these two interrelated projects would be to show how positions such as those just canvassed could benefit from statism with its framework of a basic structure of society and moving over to some alternative framework that makes a fuller use of pluralism as a viable alternative to statism. In Cohen and Sabel’s case there remains an unresolved tension in their view between the explicit intention to theorize justice beyond the statist confines of the cosmopolitan and westphalian positions and the affirmation of a lingering weak statism grounded in reasonable pluralism as the primary context for procedural norms of

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Scheffler 1999, 129; for further descriptions of his conception of the specific kind of intermediate position defended by Scheffler see chapters 4-6 in the volume in which the quoted essay is reprinted.

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governance. But a full break from all forms of statism is available to Cohen and Sabel in a fuller endorsement of pluralism. This seems indeed to be the direction in which they are already headed when they assert that “it is now a mistake to assign the state so fundamental a role in political morality.” 18 The view I develop below can be taken as an extension of certain aspects of Cohen and Sabel’s view offered on the basis of a pragmatist approach to pluralism as furnished in other political contexts by certain pragmatists contemporary and classical.

Pragmatist Public Pluralism At the core of pragmatist public pluralism is the view that current political realities are constituted by a broad intersection of a plurality of different practical mechanisms shaping them. According to this view the problem of global justice is formed at the intersection of a vast congeries of practices: states of all kinds, international governance bodies, private manufacturers and distributors, standards organizations, commodity markets, capital networks, communications and logistics infrastructures, humanitarian relief organizations, non-governmental philanthropies, activist celebrities, media conglomerates, media workers, even rogue militias, and yes even sociologists, political scientists, and moral philosophers. On this view the state counts as just one of these political mechanisms and as such does not deserve the theoretical privilege granted to it by statism. 19 But note that an anti-statist theory does not entail anti-state principles. Pragmatist public pluralism regards all of the aforementioned political contexts, state as well as non-state, as forming publics. Publics are

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Cohen and Sabel 2006, 149 Even if the state did assume this role through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (a debatable point) it does not do so now. We live today amidst political environments in which even the most drastic changes in state-based publics rarely produce few lasting effects if not initiated in concert with corollary changes in other publics. The most familiar examples of this are found where changes sought through state legislation are undercut by recuperation through market reaction—consider agricultural subsidies initiated in state contexts which are quickly counteracted by being bid back into the price of farmland in market contexts. 19

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understood as processes formed through intersections of: pluralities of persons expressing pluralities of demands on the basis of pluralities of values. The core of pragmatist public pluralism can be specified in terms of two theses. First is that there are a plurality of publics constituting our global political reality today (call this the pluralization of publicity).

Second is that each of these publics is itself internally

pluralistic in such a way that they too are political (call this the politicization of privacy). Pragmatist public pluralism can thus be summarized in the following two claims: there is no unified public sphere and there is no singular depoliticized private sphere. Everything is potentially public and publicity itself constitutes a plurality. Privacy develops contextually within every public and is itself pluralistic. Whereas the idea of the basic structure developed by Rawls lends itself to monist interpretations of justice in statist terms, the idea of publics which I am here using was originally offered by Dewey (building on James) as a way of emphasizing the pervasiveness of pluralism in modern political life. 20 Pragmatist public pluralism can accordingly be seen as breaking from basic structure statism in terms of the same two relations which I used to explicate statism above: as concerns the site and means of justice. Given the enormous plurality of the publics constitutive of even the most everyday activities, there is no reason to single out any one of these publics as the primary site of publicity or as the primary means of public power. We need to rethink the core framing ideas of statism to the effect that there exists a singular public sphere about which and through which we can capably address the varied demands for global justice. Pluralism as I use it here thus means pluralism about the site at which justice applies and pluralism about the means used to achieve justice. There are no doubt other aspects of pluralism which, although important for a fuller account of

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Cf. Dewey (1927) and James (1891); for a right reading of Dewey along these lines see Westbrook (1991, 305ff.) and Gould (2004, 46ff.); for a broader interpretation of pragmatism bolstering this reading of classical pragmatist political philosopher see my forthcoming book Pragmatism as Transitionalism.

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distributive justice than I seek here, can be left to the side for the purposes of explicating pluralism as an alternative to statism. 21 By breaking from the statist thesis and its attendant framing devices such as the idea of the basic structure, public pluralism enabling us to both deny the global state thesis (with the westphalians) and affirm the global demand thesis (with the cosmopolitans). Here is where public pluralism best resonates with Cohen and Sabel, who claim that, “interdependence and organized cooperation in the absence of a state trigger normative demands that are greater than humanitarianism even if they fall short of the full measure of equal respect and concern that underpins arguments for domestic distributive justice.” 22 Public pluralism enables us to deny the global state thesis by affirming that global power structures are informed by a diverse intersection of a variety of publics such that the state is just one of many such publics. Public pluralism enables us to affirm the global demand thesis to the effect that there are today an increasing number of legitimate demands for distributive justice at the global level. We witness these demands being issued from amidst a variety of public contexts including international aid agencies and global civil society, in other words not only in state-based contexts. There is no good reason for interrogating the legitimacy of these demands on the basis of their not having been issued in or through the state. If there are pluralities of nonstate institutions which form the sites in which the problems of global poverty arise, then we should expect such demands to arise in the very context of these non-state institutions. These non-state institutions, in short, are public institutions even if they can be neither regulated by nor represented in typical statist norms of both a procedural and substantive variety. They constitute publics even in the absence of a basic structure, that is even in the absence of states and laws.

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Cf. De Bres (forthcoming) for just such a fuller account of various kinds of pluralism about global justice. Cohen and Sabel 2005, 771

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Pragmatist public pluralism doubly breaks from the idea of the basic structure of society: we do not need the idea of a global basic structure in order to understand the demands for global justice increasingly heard in today’s globalizing publics nor do we need the institutions of a global basic structure in order to effectively respond to these demands where we can legitimately do so. We should do what work we can to fulfill these demands from within the plurality of public contexts in which they are issued—demands for more egalitarian practices need not be met by a singular state framework regulating a singular basic social structure. In adopting such a view pragmatism not only resonates with, but also extends, intermediate pluralist views such as Cohen and Sabel’s on the basis of what Bohman calls a conception of “decentered” democracy “beyond the state”. 23 A pragmatist conception of public pluralism, ultimately going back to John Dewey and William James, disposes the presumption of statism in order to recognize that legitimate normative demands may occur outside of state contexts and may be fulfilled without state mechanisms. But what might such a pragmatist public pluralism look like? This conception turns out to be not all that radical practically although it is undeniably radical theoretically. Allow me to explain before addressing in conclusion a familiar worry about pluralism in politics. Looking around at contemporary political activity taking place in the various contexts germane to global distributive justice, we find a dizzying panoply of organizations, institutions, and formal and informal structures set up to address an incredibly wide range of problems of global justice from an incredibly diverse set of political perspectives. The political contexts in which this enormous amount of energy is expended range from nationstates (USA, UK, EU) to international global trade and capital regulators (WTO, IMF) to international aid agencies (UNICEF, OXFAM) to more localized organizations of unimaginable variety. One of the latest arrivals on the scene are public-private partnerships

23

Bohman 2007, 28ff.; note that both Bohman and Cohen and Sabel draw extensively on the EU as their model.

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(PPPs) of all varieties which effectively comprise an entirely new kind of political organization which is not easily subject to traditional norms of justice. And of course there are the many transnational corporations (TNCs) whose combined size and agility makes traditional state-based regulation look increasingly out of tune with contemporary political realities. The list of acronyms is truly bewildering. One could spend a career studying these complex structures of governance. Indeed many political scientists, political sociologists and political anthropologists do just that nowadays. But we do not need to be specialists to understand that contemporary global political reality is characterized by a plurality of crisscrossing and intersecting public spaces. Although in many ways the pluralism I am endorsing already appears manifest, it is clearly not self-evident if we lack the conceptualizations necessary for properly grasping its existence and effects.

Pragmatist

public pluralism is offered precisely as such a conceptualization. It aims to conceptualize a family of political practices which have only very recently begun to emerge and which as a consequence are in dire need of fuller conceptual articulation. Such conceptualizations play a crucial role in political philosophy by affording both the metaphilosophical orientation and the conceptual material necessary for appropriately theorizing our political affairs. So it turns out that practically-speaking pragmatist public pluralism may not be all that radical. This is in keeping with the characteristically pragmatist attitude: the pragmatist does not demand a revolution in practice, but rather looks to contemporary practices for best efforts which we can explicate as a paradigm with the hopes of extending and deepening them. Though seemingly modest in practical intent, it may appear from the vantage point of alternative philosophical positions that pragmatist public pluralism is indeed quite radical theoretically. This is because most contemporary theories of global justice (particularly those forms of westphalianism and cosmopolitanism thoroughly indebted to statist assumptions) are almost unanimously oriented toward develop a singular set of principles of global justice such

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as might be fitting to a singular basic social structure. But we now have reason to doubt that any singular set of principles articulated by a statist theory could be adequately applied to contemporary problems of global justice given the plurality of contexts in which these problems are simultaneously rooted—a single solution to a diverse problem may not only prove inapplicable, it may even prove downright harmful. If the public pluralist is right to observe that the idea of a singular global basic structure is but a theoretical fancy in the context of contemporary political reality, then we must firmly face the implication that we need to radically retool our theoretical orientation as political philosophers so as to adapt ourselves to the changing political realities with which we are concerned. Thus retooling, the public pluralist does not offer a singular set of principles of justice but rather an explication and evaluation of a plurality of norms of justice. According to the public pluralist, we can give up on the time-honored project of theorizing singular norms of justice with good conscience just insofar as we inhabit a world which is increasingly finding out how to get along with a plurality of norms of justice. The task of political philosophy should thus no longer be that of developing an appropriate singular norm of distributive justice which applies to the singular global basic structure. The task should now be to explicate the plurality of egalitarian strategies for redistribution that are furnished by the plurality of publics already up and running. This sort of project will require more vigorous collaborations between political philosophers and social scientists. Once these collaborative research projects are underway (indeed they already are, albeit in a somewhat limited sense) it would be entirely surprising if it turned out there were no important conflicts amongst the various egalitarian strategies furnished by current practice. Given this, it is important that political philosophers in particular focus on explicating and developing those strategies which lessen such conflict to the extent that this is possible. This focus is our best available means of response to a typical objection which will be put to any

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pluralism of the sort that I am advocating. The objection is that pluralism cannot equip us with the tools requisite for meeting the problems of conflict engendered by pluralities of norms. In short, it will be objected, pluralism invites relativism. This objection is misguided, but instructively so. A two-step reply further illuminates pluralism. The first step is to note that conflict is an irreducible condition of politics in modernity and increasingly so with globalization. Pluralism means taking political conflict seriously as a practical condition of politics. Pluralism in this sense is meant to orient our theoretical work, both descriptive and normative. The second step is to show that orienting our theoretical work in light of pluralism helps us capture the importance of a pair of clearly thin yet crucially valuable political norms that have always proven crucial for liberal democratic politics: tolerance and inclusion. 24 These norms are best construed in terms of the quintessential liberal harm principle (intervene only so as to prevent harm) and the quintessential democratic inclusion principle (all affected are to be included in deliberations). These two norms should be conceived as related to each other in such a way as to generate productive tensions that enable both the formation of a plurality of publics and their corollary privacies as well as the decomposition of the same. The harm principle stabilizes tolerant normative formations in such a way as is described by the quintessential liberal conception of separate public and private spheres while the inclusion principle is constantly working so as to open up these normative formations to destabilization and more inclusive reorganization. The inclusion principle enables us to apply the harm principle pluralistically and contextually such that what stabilizes is a plurality of publics which contextually generate a plurality of corollary privacies and such that these pluralities are always destabilizing one another. In this way a liberal democratic norm of tolerant inclusion functions to insure an ongoing plurality of different kinds of publicity and privacy in modern political contexts. We can sum up this two-step reply by observing that it is no

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These two crucial norms for contemporary justice were ably brought together by James (1891).

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accident that liberal democracy and deep pluralism tend to tarry with one another. But the claim here is not that tolerance and inclusion in the second step strictly follow from pluralism in the first. The claim is rather that conceptions of justice which are oriented by conditions of pluralism should tend toward tolerance and inclusiveness insofar as not doing so will generate severe tensions with the pluralism that is their condition. In response to the objection that pluralism enjoins relativism, pragmatist public pluralisms should emphasize that it is precisely pluralism that enables us to work toward formulating more tolerant and inclusive normative conceptions. The best way of realizing a broad normative practice of tolerant inclusion such as this is not to insist that there must be some singular institutional framework which arbitrates amongst all parties to a political action. That would be antithetical to the norm itself. Indeed the conception of pragmatist public pluralism is motivated in large part by the recognition that such singular institutional frameworks are increasingly unavailable under political conditions of globalization—even if we had a single set of norms that we could theoretically settle on as best we would still face the impossible labor of implementation. A better approach would be to boldly accept the fact that certain of the conflicts which characterize our contemporary global pluralism may be an irreducible part of our political condition today. If so, then perhaps tolerant inclusion should not be theorized and practiced in terms of a singular institutional framework which applies to everyone in everyplace, but in terms of working toward political practices which ever seek to mitigate the most destructive forms of conflict which we find ourselves facing. Perhaps what we need is a norm of tolerant inclusion that is developed on the basis of the pluralistic political condition in which we find ourselves, rather than a norm of tolerant inclusion that regards pluralism as a deficiency whose consequences ought to be avoided. If this is right, then we should learn to work with the conflicts engendered by pluralism, rather than insisting that we must devise a theory of justice that works around them.

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According to this view, the best answer to the conflicts of pluralism is not an avoidance of pluralism, but more pluralism such that we are able to proliferate the political, institutional, and ethical contexts in which distributive inequalities and other injustices might be redressed. We can take confidence in the promising possibility that such a pluralist view might enable us to adequately address the problems of global justice without forcing ourselves to address those problems from the vantage of a singular political framework which would beg in advance many of the most important questions which trigger in the first place the welter of legitimate demands for global justice which are as yet unmet today.

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